Malofiej 2012 presentations – Who was the hottest?

ATTENDING A NICHE-CONFERENCE like the infographics summit called Malofiej is an unpredictable affair. Some presenters bring material of such quality, that you’re simply blown away. Others present viewpoints, that will make you think deeply about our craft. Some even combine the two – and of course some brings neither. It all gives a certain rythm to the experience. You feel up – you feel down – you feel up again.

Imagine the audience as a big heart pounding the material around. We all feel the warmth and creativity springing forth when every cell is served plenty of the good stuff, and then suddenly we all struggle to survive the 40 minutes, when we’re fed just a small droplet of interesting material.

This year a group of seven Danish infographics artists, myself included, attended Malofiej – and we had a blast. In general we got the up-feeling a lot more, than we experienced the down-feeling. We had challenged ourselves to rate each presentation, combine the results and work with the numbers afterwards, as a comment to the dataviz-theme of this year. We wanted to visualize a relevant dataset to see patterns emerge and fuel our discussions.

We decided to only rate the presentations although a conference is of course so much more:

The networking, which would get a good rating because infografistas are all so friendly.

The Gold-Awards-presentation, which would have hit an absolute bottom.

The bonus-sessions with four infographic superstars at the hotel, when everyone else had left the building. Top!

The weather. Starting very low, but with a fantastic finale (25 degrees Celsius).

And then the rest of it … If you were in Pamplona yourself this year, you could probably continue this list for a long time.

As you can see from some of the rating-graphics attached to this post, the group practically fell in love with Carl de Torres right there a Friday afternoon in Pamplona. What he showed us was such high quality, that we wanted to see more and more and more. But the two german girls, Anne Gerdes and Nora Croenenberg, Jaime Serra, Nigel Holmes, Andrew Vande Moere and Bryan Christie certainly had our hearts pounding fast as well.

Congratulations to the people behind the conference for selecting such a capable group of speakers, and if you put all the numbers together and average them out, you’ll find that the average speaker hit us with 6.3 out of 10, which is probably about as much as a heart can handle in two intense days of infographics in the Spanish spring.

I have written the post to follow with the theme of the first graphic. Other good themes were the Jumping Jester (the bar, where everyone meets up) and the Aura-theme for how radiant the presenters were: